By JAMES WALLACE, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Tuesday, November 13, 2007

At the Dubai Air Show, the number of jetliners ordered this week by airlines in the Persian Gulf is approaching $100 billion at list prices.

"We've never seen orders like this week before," Scott Carson, the head of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, told Zawya Dow Jones news service.

But if the bubble bursts in these oil-rich countries, many of the jets ordered from Airbus and The Boeing Co. will never be delivered, some industry analysts said.

Dubai-based Emirates, already the largest carrier in that part of the world, has so many jets on order from the two airplane makers, including 58 of the world's biggest passenger planes, the A380, that analyst Adam Pilarski estimates that every man, woman and child in Dubai would have to make 1,000 airplane flights a year to fill the seats in all those planes.

Contrast that, he said, with the United States, which has a population of about 300 million and about 700 million jetliner passenger flights a year.

"It doesn't make any sense," said Pilarski, senior aviation analyst with Avitas, an industry consulting business. "This is loony tunes."

In addition to the 58 double-decker A380s on firm order, Emirates announced this week that it will order 80 A350s from Airbus and take options to buy 50 more. It previously had ordered 55 Boeing 777s and 10 747-8 freighters.

Emirates already has a fleet of more than 100 planes.

Qatar Airways, with a fleet of nearly 60 jets, this week firmed up deals with Boeing for 30 787s plus options for 30 more. It has 27 Boeing 777s on order. Earlier this year, at the Paris Air Show, Qatar ordered 80 A350s from Airbus and a handful of A380s.

Also on a spending spree at Dubai was state-owned Dubai Aerospace Enterprise, a newcomer in the aircraftleasing business. It kickstarted that business with preliminary deals with Boeing and Airbus for 200 planes, including A350s and 787s.

Other Middle East airlines have also ordered new jets at the Dubai show.

Boeing's Carson said in the interview with Zawya Dow Jones that the Dubai show now ranks with Paris and Farnborough -- the world's biggest air shows -- and it "won't be long" before Dubai surpasses those two.

The Dubai show is held every year. The Paris air show is held in odd years, and the Farnborough show in England is held in even years.

Pilarski, the industry analyst, said there is no logic to the current spending spree by airlines such as Emirates and Qatar.

"They will not take many of those planes," he predicted. "I'm willing to have bets with people about that."

"In a few years, things will change. Oil prices will come back down to some semblance of normal, and people in the Middle East will realize this cannot continue," he said.

Dubai is part of the United Arab Emirates.

The ruling family in Dubai is transforming the city into a tourist mecca, with one of the largest airports in the world.

"One act of terrorism and all the tourism goes away," Pilarski said.

But even if everything goes the way Emirates hopes, he said, "there is no way they can form an airline that size." There is simply not enough traffic, he said.

Only China probably has the kind of growth potential that could accommodate such large jetliner order numbers, Pilarski said.

"This is a colossal bubble," Aboulafia agreed. And if it should burst, he said, then it's "bubble, bubble, toil and trouble" for Emirates, Qatar and others in that region.

If not, he added, then the legacy airlines in Europe and Asia had better watch out.

Emirates can't begin to fill all those planes on order so it will have to go after passengers carried by airlines such as British Airways, Lufthansa, Air France and Qantas, Aboulafia said.

"You could see the most aggressive traffic-hunting expedition in the history of the industry," he said.